Jimmy Carter’s Disastrous Olympic Boycott

Muhammad Ali was exhausted as he clambered from a plane on a tarmac in Tanzania as the waiting throng exploded with enthusiasm. “ALI, ALI, ALI,” the crowd chanted. By all appearances, the former champion’s arrival in Dar es Salaam looked familiar enough: exactly like the humanitarian missions to which the boxer had become accustomed. But this was different, and Ali—who had been doing charity work in India the day before—was groggy. Worst of all, he was unsure about why he was even there.

In a plan that seemed like a good one when it was hatched, U.S. State Department officials were dispatched to India in January 1980 to convince the boxing legend and Olympic gold medalist to help them lobby African countries to support a proposed American boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow. The boycott had been ordered by President Jimmy Carter in response to the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but the White House knew that a failure to get other nations to similarly boycott could embarrass the U.S. and render its move to sit out the games ineffective. Now the president was in bad need of assistance in selling the plan abroad—and the boxing legend was needed in Africa. Ali, offended by the Russian invasion himself, agreed to lend a hand.

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The night before he left for Tanzania, the first stop on the diplomatic tour, Ali had a late-night meeting with the Soviet ambassador to India, Yuli Vorontsov, who tried to convince Ali not to make the trip. Vorontsov failed, but the exhausted boxer spent his flight sleeping and arrived in Africa poorly informed and was quickly rebuffed. Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, insulted that Carter had sent a mere athlete to discuss the boycott, refused to meet with the special envoy. Ali was hustled into a press conference that quickly became combative. The boxer was stunned when asked if he was a puppet of the White House. “Nobody made me come here and I’m nobody’s Uncle Tom,” he said.

When Carter called to get an update, the news was not good. “Ali began to talk about jumping ship,” one member of the delegation reported to the president. In a meeting with the Tanzanian minister of youth and culture, Chediel Mgonja, someone slipped him a note, calling him a stooge of Jimmy Carter. The mission limped along, though it never recovered from the bad press. Sports columnist Shirley Povich of the Washington Post declared, “The whole fiasco was not all Ali’s fault. Much of the blunder can be traced to the White House.” An editorial in the Economist dryly noted: “It seemed, no doubt, like a good idea at the time.” As a metaphor for the larger American struggle to initiate a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, the Ali trip was a good one.

Muhammad Ali meets with Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi to enlist support for the Olympic boycott. | AP Photo

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The sight of Soviet tanks rumbling into Afghanistan in December 1979 can easily be regarded as the moment the stage was set for the U.S. boycott. But conditions had been developing for years as the 1970s, a period of managed competition between the two superpowers, came to a close. It was a time when the Cold War was supposedly less dangerous, but still ongoing. While Americans saw themselves making economic concessions in return for good Soviet behavior and negotiating from a position of equality with Moscow, the Kremlin considered the concessions a reward for its military buildup.

It was against this backdrop that Kremlin leaders decided to make their move in Afghanistan. The invasion was the Soviet Union’s first grab of new territory since the end of World War II. Where Washington saw communist aggression, the perspective was significantly different in Moscow. Soviet leaders wanted to bolster a flailing regime in their backyard, a short-term maneuver of no real importance to any other country. They expected few international repercussions. It never occurred to them that it would spoil the Olympic party they planned to host the next summer.

I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but the patriotic thing to do is for us to send a team over there and whip their ass.”

Perhaps nobody saw the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in more dire terms than Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser and a hard-line cold warrior. “Afghanistan is the seventh state since 1975 in which communist parties have come to power with Soviet guns and tanks, with Soviet military power and assistance,” Brzezinski told Carter.

Brzezinski also saw an opportunity for Carter to assert himself on matters of foreign policy. But what could the United States hope to do? Carter began to realize he had few levers to pull. Rolf Pauls, the West German ambassador to NATO, suggested an Olympic boycott. The White House was intrigued. In a meeting of the National Security Council, Lloyd Cutler, the White House counsel, argued that the United States should boycott the Olympics only if it were combined with other strong action. Vice President Walter Mondale was enthusiastic, claiming that a boycott “could capture the imagination of the American people.” Cutler, despite his reservations about the boycott, said he saw no problem in implementing one; seizing passports of the athletes would be a simple way to keep them from traveling overseas. As for the president, according to White House notes of the meeting, Carter said the idea sent “cold chills” down his spine.

Almost instantly, the press supported a boycott. On Jan. 10, the Washington Post’s Robert G. Kaiser, a former correspondent in Moscow, wrote, “There should be no underestimating the significance the Soviets themselves put on their selection. They have been treating this Olympiad as one of the great events of their modern history.” A boycott, he argued, “would be a tremendous blow to Soviet prestige; but perhaps more significant, the collapse of this Olympiad would send a genuine shock through Soviet society.”

CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner disagreed, and passed along an agency finding that a boycott would have limited impact on the Soviet Union. It could even backfire on the United States, he warned. “The Soviets would also be able to play the role of an aggrieved party before a partially sympathetic international audience and to utilize international disagreements over the boycott to exacerbate tensions between the U.S. and non-boycotting (or reluctantly boycotting) states, probably including some close U.S. allies.”

A boycott was popular; 55 percent of the American people supported the idea. But Olympians fervently opposed it. “Any boycott isn’t going to change the Soviets’ mind and isn’t going to get troops out of Afghanistan,” complained Julian Roosevelt, an American member of the International Olympic Committee. “I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but the patriotic thing to do is for us to send a team over there and whip their ass.” Al Oerter, a four-time gold medalist in the discus who was trying to make a comeback at age 42, agreed: “The only way to compete against Moscow is to stuff it down their throats in their own backyard.”

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Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author ofDropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War, from which this article was adapted. (The views expressed here are his alone and do not represent the policy of the U.S. Navy or the Department of Defense.)